A while back I posted on why I don’t think anyone today really believes that God, exactly as depicted in the Bible, exists. In the Bible, God doesn’t hesitate to show off, demonstrating power by sending fire from heaven, parting seas, bringing darkness at midday, and so on. Today, religious believers who claim to believe in the same God and take the Bible literally expect to get a parking spot to open up, not that a new one miraculously be painted for them by angels.
I thought of this when I saw this cartoon by Wulff Morgenthaler, which Arni Zachariassen linked to:
The problem is perhaps neither that God is not serious, but that God (or whatever term one may prefer to use to refer to transcendent, ultimate reality) is not as depicted in the Bible. I suspect that deep down, most people, most religious believers, know that to be the case, but feel as though it is appropriate to pay lip service to the Biblical depiction of God, or suppress and deny what they think or suspect or fear might be the case.
But human thinking about God has always been changing, and we see a small measure of it even within the pages of the Bible, which provide evidence of development from an idea of God defeating a sea monster to create, to creating by forming matter, to creating simply by speaking with nothing offering opposition.
It is thus, in one sense, perfectly Biblical for our ideas of God to change. Ironic as it might seem, it might be perfectly Biblical to not think of God in Biblical terms.
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